1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is relates broadly to methods and techniques for identifying sound files. More particularly, the present invention concerns a method for generating and assigning an identifying tag to a sound file, wherein the tag is generated using a standard number of chosen points on the sound file's unique frequency domain, thereby facilitating determining the sound file's location, transferring the sound file, and comparing multiple sound files.
2. Description of the Prior Art
It will be appreciated that it is often desirable or necessary to assign identifying tags to sound files to facilitate accurate identification of such files. Currently, this is accomplished either by a user who assigns a tag arbitrarily chosen based upon, for example, a name, date, or description of the sound file, or by a computer that assigns a tag based upon an arbitrarily selected segment of the sound file. Unfortunately, these methods result in subjective and arbitrary identifying tags that do not accurately represent or label the file and that lack of standardization and functionality. Such arbitrary and inaccurate identifying tags can, and do, create situations where two versions of essentially the same sound file are assigned different tags due to the subjective nature of the tagging system. For example, if a computer uses the first 100 bits of a sound file to create an identifying tag for that file, the computer may generate a substantially different identifying tag for a second, virtually identical sound file. This occurs because no consideration is given to oddities in the sound files such as white noise, static, gaps, and poor quality. Such oddities can create slight differences in the chosen 100 bit segment of the sound files and, though the files are otherwise virtually identical, cause the computer to assign different identifying tags.
Additionally, because identifying tags assigned to sound files are not standardized, links are to the sound files are also not standardized. This results in inefficient searching that can return large number of false positives and false negatives that must then be manually searched in order to identify the desired sound file.
Due to the above-identified and other problems and disadvantages in the art, a need exists for an improved method of generating and assigning identifying tags to sound files.